Le blog d'un loup pas vraiment solitaire

I have found a job on summer 2016 and now working on several other business projects not related to video games, so I cannot focus on the Wolfzone mod anymore because I don't have enough time to develop it, so progress will be slowed down.

There is plenty of amazing mods for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game, so I will try to merge those I like instead of making one from scratch.

This blog will also change a bit and will now talk about other topics I like but not necessarily related to video games, furthermore I will switch to French my native language for next articles.

idTech3, the engine powering Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory game is a really good engine, but is a little outdated now. Many features that more recent engines have are missing and I don't have enough knowledge and time to add them to the engine. So, I have decided to move to another engine more up to date.

I really like the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games series, I've got all three opus, the engine matches almost to all the features which I look for, and since all tools and also engine source code are available, I thought that it was the best choice to make.

I spent most of the 2016 year to try to understand how the X-Ray engine works, and late in the year, I began to experiment the process of exporting objects and maps I have made for the Wolfzone mod to X-Ray engine.

This rewards months of hard work to make a game which begin to match what i wanted to get.

This release also represent the beginning of a new task which will take months of works too in order to append all features which i am thinking about and who, i hope, will make this mod enjoyable and entertaining to play.

Keep in mind that it's a work in progress so don't expect too much at first.

There is only one map at the moment.

A lot of weapons needs to be replaced by their contemporary equivalents.

There is only one style of player currently.

The gameplay is currently a simple stopwatch team deathmatch mode with infinite respawn (for bots and player), and objectives and missions will be added later to that game mode.

Bots behaviors need to be improved and it happen too often that they get stuck against a wall and they cannot release themselves, but also they show a really low strategy skill when they fight what can sometimes give a feeling of lack of challenge.
On the other hand, if you don't react fast enough, they will blow you up in no time.

Early_Access_Version_Released - 6 images

But well, enough small talk, i suppose that you can't wait to test that first version in order you can make yourself an opinion on your own, so here is the links:

The engine runs well now, both on Windows and Linux, but i have delayed the release for a few days more to improve and polish a bit some parts of the mod.

Game mode:

It only remain one game mode now: "Objective". A stopwatch team deathmatch mode with infinite respawn (for bots and player) and objectives (but objectives will be implemented later).

Game time:

You can now select the stopwatch time before running the map. Time can be set from 1 to 60 minutes.

Bots:

I have found a way to get more control for bots, so i started to implement some behaviors. The first and more important one is to prevent the bot to stay static at the same place for a long time. Bot move randomly now from waypoints to waypoints searching for some enemies and engage you as soon as it see you.

One issue is that even at lowest skill level bots are deadly if you don't move fast enough, i will lower this too efficient accuracy in the next releases.

I have also added a last waypoints stack list to avoid to use the same waypoint too often.

Grass shader:

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory foliage technology is really a FPS killer if you don't use it with care, and grass cover use this feature.

While tweaking it, i found that removing the deformVertexes function and setting outer distanceCull to 4096 instead of 0, there is almost no FPS drop.

Release:

I'm working on it. As soon as i think playing with the mod is fun with those last improvements, i will make the Windows and Linux archive and then release them.

To get the Wolfzone mod development move forward quickly, i switched to ET:Legacy engine. It's a really good engine with a lot of bugs fixed and many improvements made.

But unfortunately, at the level of the source code, ET:Legacy engine is not really compatible with the old Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory engine and obviously with the Wolfzone mod and all the modifications which I had made.

So, for me, the biggest difficulty of these last weeks was to merge ET:Legacy engine and mod with Wolfzone mod.

I still have some work to do, but overall, the mod, in it's new configuration is almost done to get an almost payable version ready to be released.

What remains to be done?

Check for correct operation of bots,

Append all the Wolfzone mod weapons,

Integrate Limbo menu and inventory.

What is new with the ET:Legacy engine switch?

Windows version (tested with Windows XP and Windows 7),

The sound works well now,

OpenGL 3 and up support.

So i'm working on it, and with a little luck the almost playable version will be available before Christmas.

And finally, I would like to show you those skins and player models from marze addon working with Wolfzone mod.